Breath of the Wild was a mid game, and a bad Zelda game outright. It ditched nearly everything that players had come to expect from a Zelda game. Tears was way better, but still lacked the feeling of being a Zelda game. If you removed all the Zelda assets, would anyone be able to truly call it a Zelda game? With Link to the Past all the way to even Skyward Sword I certainly could.
But the effect the games financial success has had on Nintendo as a whole has been devastating. Nintendo is the kind of company that will learn all the wrong lessons and none of the right ones. They are literal Monkey Paw thinkers. They saw the PS1 outpace the N64 and thought “people want disks, okay lets pick this really odd format disk with a tiny storage limit instead of using normal ones.” And then when the Gamecube failed they said “oh, people must not want powerful hardware I guess, lets just sell people the same hardware again so its underpowered this time but add a motion control gimmick.”
So when BotW was a financial success, they immediately believe that all of their big games need an open world, or need to be vast departures from what players expect from each series. It is truly tragic.
jacksilver@lemmy.world 1 week ago
To be honest I think BOTW has had a negative effect on Nintendos approach to game design. While BOTW had its highlights, TOTK doubling down on a very large empty world without real dungeons got boring fast.